A Good Idea At The Time
by Miss Freckle
Summary: If you're absolutely positively sure you're going to die, it's okay to reveal the name of the person you're in love with to whoever is around you, right? ...Not if you survive. NO flames, please. If you don't like slash, no one is making you read it.


A Good Idea At The Time

_by Miss Freckle_

**Disclaimer**: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.   
**A/N**: Er. Thanks to mon petit chou for encouraging me to write this. 3!

It all seemed very natural at the time, he thought rather sulkily to himself. You're in the Throes of Danger, all too certain of your Impending Doom. Why not declare your secret love to the one person who can't tell anyone about it because they're about to die, too, dammit!

Unfortunately the situation was more like a misguided suicide attempt. He'd landed on the pavement from sixteen stories above all right, but instead of instant death he'd only succeeded in paralyzing himself for the rest of his embarrassing life, incapable of even avenging his humiliation by finishing off the deed. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way!

Which is how Draco Malfoy found himself in a rather uncomfortable Hospital Wing bed, slightly damaged with perhaps a cast or two but, to his great consternation, very much alive. Not that he preferred death to life, as a general rule, but now that he had sealed his fate by revealing his deepest secret, death was looking pretty good right about now.

And it wasn't as if the new keeper of his secret had died, too. Oh, no, that would have been too kind a fate. In fact the person responsible for Draco's future humiliation and subsequent (naturally) voluntary expulsion from Hogwarts was sitting right at the foot of his bed, devil-may-care!

He took a minute to have an "Oh, _shit_" moment. But not before the red-haired menace saw him with his eyes open (and no doubt displaying an admirable range of emotions on his face in a short span of time) and widened his own eyes in surprise.

"Er, uh... hi, Malfoy."

He _knew_. He so knew. Blasted red-haired bugger.

"You're alive." The words were out of his mouth before he could even think of something a little less idiotic to say. Or, he amended, something that didn't give away exactly what he was thinking about.

"Er... yeah. At the, uh, last moment Harry saved us."

_Potter!_ Draco couldn't hide his shock. And then it hit him—what if _he'd_ heard Draco's wretched confession too? Surely it had reverberated off the walls, echoing down the hallways and rooms for the listening pleasure of all. He wouldn't be surprised if it made the _Daily Prophet _headline today. "Draco Malfoy Declares Love for—"

Draco couldn't bear it. He had to know. "So you heard—"

"Yes," Ron cuts him off shortly. "I heard." He stared at Draco a moment, those damned blue eyes guarded and uncertain, but hiding something—something Draco's mind overlooked in its Need to Worry.

_Blast it all that the one moment I am absolutely sure I am going to die, I have to go and make a bloody declaration of love to the one person who would, under any other circumstances, run to tell the world about it!_ And if Potter had heard too, well, they'd probably had a good laugh about it as they pushed the magical stretcher along in front of them, Draco's unconscious body lying helplessly prone on the flimsy white mat. And why did _he _have to be the pansy in the situation, the one who had blacked out due to—he looked down to assess his injuries—a _broken arm and a couple of scratches? _God, he must have looked like the biggest girl next to Ron, all tall and lanky, muscles used to fighting off attacks from his older brothers, skin perpetually tanned from healthy outdoors exercise, when Draco couldn't even muster up a sunburn. _Ron _certainly wasn't in a hospital bed, oh no, he was sitting right next to Draco on _his _bed that he'd had to wake up in because he was too much of a poof to fucking _stay conscious_, and it _wasn't his fault he was delicate!_

And then it occurred to Draco, as Ron's face seemed to be moving closer and closer to his own, that perhaps it hadn't been the fear of Impending Doom that had caused him to black out, but rather—_oh. _A sensation quite like this one. Something warm and wet and tasting faintly of cinnamon in his mouth, and wait, this was _Ron's mouth on his_, and he was _kissing him_, and somehow he had the feeling that it wasn't the first time it had happened. Oh no, back when the Death Eaters were closing in on them, and everything had gone very dark around them, and he was clutching fearfully to Ron's robes (a rather girly move in hindsight), it had only seemed to fit to look into those damn beautiful blue eyes and tell him that before they disappeared in a flash of green light, a rather untimely end don't you think, well anyway—"I love you!"

It was the kind of declaration that would make you cringe at any other time and ridicule yourself self-deprecatingly about it for weeks afterward, but when you said it with such desperation and were so very convinced that the end was, in fact, Quite Near, it seemed like the most natural thing! And Ron had—Ron had—done just what he was doing right now, had kissed him desperately and deeply and _oh, _as he felt those warm arms (how were his arms always so warm? like he'd just come in from outside?) wrap around him, once behind his head and one to catch—accidentally or not?—on his nipple, and he couldn't help but let out a squeak, which, as he thought back on it, was perhaps not the best way to prove that Draco Malfoy Is Not A Pansy, but considering that he was making out with a boy on a hospital bed right about now, he wasn't exactly making the best case for it. And Ron's face was so close that he could see every brown freckle, and then he realized that you aren't supposed to keep your eyes open while kissing, are you, so he closed them, and focused instead on Ron's tongue—his _tongue!­_—somehow making its way into his mouth, and it was all velvet and smooth, but rough somehow too, and everything felt so right, and he was so glad, _so glad_, for Voldemort right at this very moment in time. Which was perhaps rather an odd thought, all things considering, but he wasn't, in fact, considering those things right now, as he was _kissing Ron Weasley _and it was wonderful and perhaps he was a bit of a fairy after all.


End file.
